Justice Dept.: Sessions recused from probe due to campaign

09 June 2017

Comey said it was that tweet that prompted him to ask a friend to reveal the contents of the memo to a reporter the following Tuesday, May 16. Comey built an arsenal of evidence, and in the past two days, he has deployed it with lethal intent. The written testimony was nearly cinematic in the way the narrative unfolded, adding dramatic elements for a Washington thriller that has gripped the capital and the country for months and that has no foreseeable ending.

"How can Russian Federation influence our election?" she asked incredulously. He did the same thing on January 27, after Trump requested his "loyalty" at a private dinner.

"I don't think it's for me to say whether the conversation I had with the President was an effort to obstruct", Mr Comey said.

"I feel he's doing a wonderful job for our country", said Donna Hubers of Baltimore, who was checking her phone for Comey updates.

Comey was so concerned by the dinner, and the perceived threat to the FBI's independence, that he documented that and other meetings with the president in personal memos.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio asked Comey whether he perceived the president's request to let the Flynn matter go as an order given Trump's position as president, the setting and the circumstances surrounding the conversation.

But Comey later said he took the president's assertion as akin to a command. "I wouldn't want to alert the White House it had happened", Comey said of Trump's request about Flynn, "until we figured out what we were going to do with it investigatively". Daniel Richman later confirmed to Reuters he was the one to whom Comey referred in his testimony.

In response to questions from senators, Comey repeatedly cast Trump as a boss or "patron" trying to secure his loyalty, something that Comey said made him "uneasy".

Asked who the friend was, he said: "A close friend who is a professor at Columbia law school".

Kallstrom finds the decision to appoint a special counsel as "weak" and said Comey's relationship with Mueller is problematic. His opening statement was the work of a prosecutor.

Comey said the Trump administration had lied and defamed him and the Federal Bureau of Investigation after his firing by saying the agency was in disarray and that the workforce had lost confidence in him.

At one point, when the subject of possible tape recordings existing of his conversations with the president arose, Comey sounded like he should have been sitting on a Southern porch sipping lemonade in a heat wave rather than on a Beltway hot seat: "Lordy, I hope there are tapes", he exclaimed. "That's a great question, " Comey replied.

Pa. House gears up for huge gambling expansion voteThe bill does not affect retired employees and exempts state police, corrections officers, and other law enforcement. Bob Jazwinski, of Hermitage, was on the CPA group's Fiscal Responsibility Task Force that authored the report .

While Mr Comey confirmed that the USA president was not personally under investigation as part of the inquiry in to Russian meddling in the 2016 election, he claimed that Mr Trump had sought to influence the investigation by asking him to "let go" the FBI inquiry into former national security adviser Michael Flynn at a meeting on February 14th.

"We had an investigation open at the time so that gave me a queasy feeling", he added.

The next month, after a counterterrorism briefing, Comey testified that Trump asked him to stay for a one-on-one conversation. He pointed to behavior by Trump that others, too, had witnessed: "Why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office?" "I can definitively say the president's not a liar", she said. By the time he concluded, the panel's chairman, Sen. In a statement released Wednesday, Comey said he had so informed Trump three times. That letter, as poorly thought-out as everything else Trump has done, effectively waived the executive privilege Kasowitz tried to invoke Thursday.

Marc Kasowitz, attorney for US President Donald Trump, delivers remarks at the National Press Club June 8, 2017, in Washington, DC. In fact, he kept quiet about Trump's improper attempts to influence him.

"There are so many questions that Mr. Comey's testimony leaves hanging out there". Immediately after the meeting, Comey went to his vehicle and started typing his first memo, building the evidence he would need in the event of national or personal betrayal.

"I took it as a direction", Comey told the committee. "We did the election, not Russian Federation", she said before adding, "It's all a smokescreen".

Iran supreme leader: Attacks fuel hatred toward US, SaudisThe semi-official Tasnim news agency said on of the wounded people had died in hospital, bringing the death toll to 17. He also said the attackers were armed with AK-47s and hand grenades and wore what appeared to be explosive vests.

"This whole thing is a giant nothing-burger", the conservative web site Breitbart News wrote as Comey talked, "except for Comey implicating himself as a leaker".